It’s yet another reminder that online hate has consequences. In a manifesto of sorts he posted before he shot and killed 9 black people in a Charleston church, Dylann Roof noted that he had learned his racism online. He even specified one of the hate sites that fuelled his hate: the Council of Conservative Citizens.

Now it appears he was also a regular commenter at The Daily Stormer, an especially vicious neo-Nazi “news” site.

In his manifesto, Roof wrote that he “was not raised in a racist home or environment.” As he explained, it was the Trayvon Martin case that

prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong.

Emphasis mine.

After this terrible “discovery,” Roof wrote, “I researched deeper,” ultimately “[finding] out about the Jewish problem and other issues facing our race, and I can say today that I am completely racially aware.”

One of the places he conducted this “research” was, evidently, the Daily Stormer. A researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center has discovered that a number of passages in Roof’s manifesto are virtually identical to comments left on The Daily Stormer by someone calling himself AryanBlood1488. It seems likely that this was Roof himself.

Just as Elliot Rodger seems to have picked up some of his misogynistic beliefs from PUAhate, a site whose best-known moderator at the time was a regular contributor to A Voice for Men, Roof seems to have picked up some of his “racial awareness” at The Daily Stormer, a site appealing to many of the same people — literally the same people — who regularly read and comment on popular “manosphere” sites like the proudly racist Chateau Heartiste and Roosh Valizadeh’s Return of Kings, which recently ran a long Naziesque screed, by Roosh himself, on the evils of “degenerate” and “cosmopolitan” Jews.

In the end, the various fine distinctions one can make between, for example, racist, misogynistic far-right hate sites that promote pickup artistry (like Chateau Heartiste) and racist, misogynistic far-right hate sites that don’t promote pickup artistry (like The Daily Stormer) seem less important than their innumerable similarities. They are all part of the same big ball of hate.

First Elliot Rodger, now Dylann Roof. In the past two years alone, two young men who read and commented on two specific hate sites I’ve written about on this blog have literally committed mass murders inspired by the hatreds they learned and developed online — and which they’ve spelled out clearly and unequivocally in manifestos they left behind.

Online hate has consequences in the real world. I can only hope that the authorities are paying attention.

Comments

@Robert:
Fascism was more than just a reaction to Bolshevism. Actually, this argument was at the center of a debate among German historians in the Eighties that is today known simply as the Historikerstreit. Conservative historians had used this argument to relativise the significance of fascism and point the finger at communism as the first “totalitarian” regime. Liberals argued for the singularity of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust.

On the other side, communists during the 1920s claimed that fascism was a reaction of the Bourgeoisie to being threatened by communist uprisings (October Revolution, rise of communist parties in Europe, strike waves after the war). That also doesn’t hold water, as it doesn’t explain the popularity of fascism among the working class.

Most historians today argue for a multicausality: rising class tensions, the loss of the war, a strong reactionary movement going back to before the war, elites who try (and fail) to use the rising fascist movement for their own purpose of reinstalling the monarchy.

Concerning the GDR and Soviet Russia after the war: both actually were no better than the West in reinstating former Nazis to their posts. The fact alone that to rebuid a functioning bureaucracy, they needed the experts, was enough to not persecute them too much. The Soviets were as interested in Nazi scientists and their know-how than the US, even more so when it came to their expertise in building the A-bomb (which the Russians needed as quickly as possible). Concerning the communists from Buchenwald and elsewhere: when installing the communist government in the GDR, the Soviets relied much more on the German communists that had been exiled in Russia during the war and survived the multiple purges, in which Stalin got rid of all dissenters in the exiled communist parties (he did the same with the Poles, for example).

The GDR refused to pay reparations to Israel (and also to reinstate Jewish property to the rightful owners) because they argued that the reparations paid to the SU were enough. Later, after the turn of the communist bloc towards “anti-Zionism” (read: antisemitism), they saw Israel as a “fascist state” and refused even stronger.

Obviously this kid was, in some way, seriously predisposed toward hatred already. I mean, surely not everyone who googles “black on white crime” or some such ends up diving down such a dark rabbit hole.

We Hunted the Mammoth tracks and mocks the white male rage underlying the rise of Trump and Trumpism. This blog is NOT a safe space; given the subject matter -- misogyny and hate -- there's really no way it could be.